Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Frank Pizzitola, a general partner
at Lazard Freres & Co. who worked with such legendary figures as
Andre Meyer, Michel David-Weill and Felix Rohatyn during a 21-year career at the investment bank, has died. He was 89.

He died on Dec. 17 at his home in Manhattan, according to
his son, Stephen. The cause was heart failure.

“Frank was a good banker and a good friend, and we will
all miss him,” Rohatyn said yesterday in an e-mail. Rohatyn,
84, is now special adviser to Kenneth Jacobs, chairman and chief
executive officer of Lazard Ltd., as the company is now known.

A veteran of the chemical industry, Pizzitola was one of
the “industrial men” brought into New York-based Lazard in the
1970s to carry out “the long-overdue metamorphosis inside the
firm toward industry specialization,” William Cohan wrote in
his 2007 book, “The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard
Freres & Co.” His focus was mergers and acquisitions, a field
Lazard dominated in the 1960s and 1970s.

A graduate of Harvard Business School, Pizzitola joined
Lazard in New York in 1973 after serving as president of Jim
Walter Corp., a building-materials company in Tampa, Florida.

As a general partner from 1973 to 1994, Pizzitola helped
guide Lazard in its sometimes-turbulent final decades as a
closely held family partnership.

Rohatyn’s Deputy

In 1976, during the brief rule of Donald Cook, who came to
Lazard after serving as chairman of the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission, Pizzitola became Rohatyn’s deputy partner
in charge of a reorganized corporate-finance department,
according to Cohan.

Like other Lazard partners who had been ostensibly put in
charge of investment banking, though, Pizzitola “understood the
pointlessness of the role in a small firm so totally dominated”
first by Meyer, then by Rohatyn, Cohan wrote.

Robert Agostinelli, a former Lazard senior director who
co-founded New York-based private-equity firm Rhone Capital LLC,
said in an e-mail today that Pizzitola was “a grand man” and
“an iconic Lazard partner.”

“Frank was fond of saying that Lazard defined the essence
of the grande banque d’affaires -- where a handful of focused
and capable men could alter the course of major corporate
affairs and cast a shadow far greater than their number,”
Agostinelli recalled. “Without a doubt Frank was one of those
handful.”

Eminence Grise

Even after becoming a limited partner in 1994, Pizzitola
remained a regular at the Rockefeller Center offices of Lazard,
the largest independent merger adviser.

“He was for a number of years sort of an eminence grise
there,” his son said. “He could help younger partners and
associates get in the door, to make the introduction to
clients.”

He finally reduced his involvement after Bruce Wasserstein
took Lazard public in 2005, the son said.

For authors writing about the unique culture that was
Lazard, Pizzitola was a font of colorful anecdotes.

Cary Reich, in his 1998 biography of Meyer, quoted
Pizzitola on the nervous energy of Lazard’s leader for three
decades:

“One time I saw him pick up a phone, ask a guy a question,
put the phone down, pick up the second phone and ask him if he
had the answer yet.”

According to Reich’s book, Pizzitola also told of
complaining once to Meyer about a “garbage” investment made by
the firm and being told, “You are a garbage man. You are
supposed to deal with garbage.”

‘Sole Proprietorship’

Pizzitola said he replied, “I don’t mind garbage, Mr.
Meyer, but the least you can do is open the bag and let me smell
it. Don’t just hand me the bag.”

Cohan, in his book, quoted Pizzitola describing the system
of remuneration in place under Meyer’s successor, Michel David-Weill: “This is not a partnership. It’s a sole proprietorship
with fancy profit sharing.”

Frank Joseph Pizzitola was born on Aug. 21, 1923, in
Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Joseph F. Pizzitola and the former
Veronica Moloney.

He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and
graduated from Brown University in 1949 and Harvard Business
School in 1951.

He worked for seed-maker Monsanto Co., in St. Louis, Mexico
City and Sao Paulo before moving to New York in 1956 for a job
with Olin Mathieson Chemical Corp. He then held management
positions at drugmaker E.R. Squibb & Sons and chemical producer
Celanese Corp. before joining Jim Walter Corp.

He spent 12 years as chairman of the cooperative board at
733 Park Avenue, where he lived for almost four decades.

He was married to the former Elizabeth Bailey for 61 years
until her death in 2011. A son, Paul, died in 1984 at 25.
Survivors include three children, Linda, Stephen and Gregory, and seven
grandchildren.